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Lenin did not start the revolution, but he knew how to harness its spontaneous, anarchic forces and to establish his authority by sheer organization. "Our fighting method is organization," Lenin proclaimed. "We must organize everything." When he had attained power, he evolved a network of interlocking organizations—trade unions, youth groups, administrative hierarchies, control commissions, agitation and propaganda centers—with the party as its nucleus. Before anyone else in history, he recognized the limitless potential of political and social engineering to reach into every aspect of a people's life and transform it. The durability and power of the Soviet regime testify to Lenin's essential genius as the theoretician of political organization.
Lenin applied his theories in the name of Karl Marx but, as Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington observes, "Lenin was not a disciple of Marx, rather Marx was a precursor of Lenin." Marx had not the faintest notion of what practical strategy and tactics could achieve his revolutionary goals. In many ways, Lenin revised—some would say subverted—the teachings of his proclaimed mentor. Marx predicted that the revolution would be possible only in industrially advanced nations, as the inevitable culmination of capitalist development. Lenin demonstrated that a successful Socialist revolution could take place in a backward, predominantly peasant country—thereby turning Communism into a practical program that could be applied to the underdeveloped world rather than to Europe alone. The economics of Marxism are hopelessly antiquated today, and its appeal as a secular religion is surpassed by that of nationalism. That Marxism continues to survive as a movement is a tribute to Lenin, who transformed a social theory into a plan of political action.
Instrument of Tyranny
Lenin always considered the coercive system he built as a temporary necessity. It is, of course, true that Lenin's ultimate goal was the liberation of humanity, and the creation of an egalitarian Utopia when the state, as envisioned by Marx, had withered away. Yet it was under Lenin that the CHEKA was created—the brutal, terrorizing model for all later Soviet secret-police systems. Many former capitalists were sent to forced labor camps or summarily shot. It was Lenin who started the campaign of harassment against well-to-do peasants, which escalated into open warfare when thousands of detachments of Bolsheviks forcibly requisitioned grain and other products. It was Lenin who, after the 1920 Bolshevik victory in the civil war, turned his full attention to building the gigantic machinery of rule that served as the instrument of Russia's new autocracy and, ultimately, of Stalin's tyranny.